Stepping down from SciRate maintainership
Background
I can’t remember when I first stumbled across SciRate.
I’d had a fascination with scientific papers for many years, well before actually attending university (as a mature-age student) and starting to learn more formally. I would store them in a variety of ways, print them out and hang them up in my house; send them to myself on a mailing list that I created just for that purpose, or a public subreddit where I would post the papers I wanted to read, so I wouldn’t forget about them. Evidently, the “bookmarking” feature in the browser wasn’t one I found particularly useful.
Eventually, I discovered JabRef, which I used for several years. I stored all the papers that I was interested in (at the time, quantum computing), and learned all about bibliography management. I even stored all the PDFs, and the metadata from the JabRef system, in git, horribly offending bitbuckets storage limits by having a repository ~10GB in size (I think it doesn’t clone successfully anymore; it’s been several years since I tried.)
After some time I became tired with JabRef, and built my own (very very terrible) reference management program: super-reference.
Eventually, I discovered SciRate. I think the version I found was called “SciRate 2”. It was in the hands of Bill Rosgen. I got incredibly excited and signed up immediately. Because the code was open-source (I actually can’t remember, but I think it might’ve been a personally-hosted git repository somewhere), I added possibly one of my first “impactful” changes: MathJax support! This was neat; now we could see rendered math while reading abstracts and titles! I think arXiv.org only added this feature a few years ago.
But, aside from this very minor hacking on the code, I immediately started finding SciRate actually useful! I could browse it every day; see which papers would pop up, and track papers I was interested in. Fairly quickly, it became a very addictive habit for me. I began to learn the time of day that it would update, and made sure I would scour the website shortly after to browse the “freshest” papers.
I did this for several years (actually, I only stopped recently, maybe a few months ago). I read many papers (but not every one that I would “scite”); made several nice connections, and even used my personal SciRate data to teach my first deep learning workshops. SciRate stuck with me as my interests varied from quantum computing, theoretical physics, black holes, philosophy, AI, deep learning, computer vision, generative art, category theory, astrophysics, and the stranger maths papers. For a while my favourite thing was discovering the “best paper title” of the week.
The most memorable moment was when, many years later (after the scirate3 re-write), I met people who “knew” me from SciRate, only because they had seen that I would “scite” a lot of papers (in fact, someone told me that they didn’t think I was a real person; only a scite-making bot.) To date, I’ve amassed more than one hundred thousand “scites”. And yes, most of this was done by clicking manually; but in the last year or two I’ve used a custom program I wrote: the scirate-cli.
In any case, by a very strange coincidence, during my Masters program I happened to learn that SciRate was undergoing a re-write, amazingly by a company based in Melbourne (where I lived); just down the road from my university! I happened to have a conversation with the founder of that company, Ben Toner, relating to my masters project, but it was a curious connection.
That re-write ended up going, in my view, quite well. But I think, at some point, it stopped being funded, and fell on the shoulders of mispy. Mispy funded SciRate for a while, out of their own pocket, until I decided to take it over from them.
That was, now, 5 years ago.
All I’ve really been doing in the mean time is keeping things afloat. Upgrading the various packages as is required; managing the server, and the occasional bugfixes.
The only interesting thing I did, in recent times, was to add a “jobs” feature to SciRate. This was actually moderately successful, but in the end it was more effort for me to maintain than it was worth, so I disabled it.
Current
SciRate needs a new maintainer. I’ve decided that, personally, my focus has to shift elsewhere. You can read about that in the Addendum below.
Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Take ownership of the scirate repository,
- Update the codebase occasionally, maintain deployments, fix the occasional bug,
- Manage the error emails that come in,
- Restart the server when it dies,
- ???
- Extend it in interesting ways!
The last one is actually quite important! SciRate has lacked any real new features for a very long time; but there’s certainly some interesting things that could be done! Notable among them could be:
The world is (somewhat) your oyster. Clearly there are some rules on how we’d like SciRate to develop; after all, there is a solid and growing user base, who have some expectation on how it will operate.
In any case, if you’re interested in getting involved, reach out to Aram and myself by sending us an email:
We’d love to hear from you.
Addendum
The central reason I’ve decided to stop spending time on SciRate is because of the climate emergency. I’ve been reading a lot of books and it’s become increasingly important to me to spend my energy learning more and doing more (or less!) in this space. If you’re interested in this too, then please reach out; I’d love to chat!